PSF Strategic Plan 2026: Full Draft Open for Community Feedback

PSF
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The PSF is excited to share that the board has been developing a strategic plan to guide the foundation’s direction over the next five years. We are sharing the high-level goals today in our Strategic Planning at the PSF blog post as a starting point to collect feedback and commentary from the community. Check out the post to learn more about why we’re doing this now, the direction of the plan, and how we plan to steward the strategic plan as we move forward.

If any of these goals matter to you, or if you think we are missing something important, we want to hear from you.

We welcome you to leave comments here or email strategy@python.org to share your thoughts.

Beyond this thread, we also welcome you to join the conversation with us at:

  • PSF Board Office Hours on May 12 and June 9th, on the PSF Discord. We hope to spend both of these sessions focused on discussing the strategic plan with people from the community.

  • PyCon US 2026 at the Members Lunch and a dedicated Open Space session. We know only a small fraction of our community will be present at PyCon US this year, so we warmly welcome you to engage with us on Discuss and via the email address provided above.

This plan will shape what the PSF does and how it spends its resources for the next five years. If you use Python, contribute to it, or participate in communities around it, you have a stake in shaping its future.

Jannis Leidel, PSF Board Chair, on behalf of the PSF Board of Directors

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2026-06-11 Python Steering Council meeting summary
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In our previous post, we shared the high-level goals of the PSF’s strategic plan. Today we are publishing the full draft and opening a community feedback window. Read the full context in our new blog post.

You can read the full draft here: PSF Strategic Plan Community Draft 2026

The draft includes detailed objectives under each program goal and tactical ideas under each organizational goal. It was shaped by community interviews, board planning sessions, and PSF staff feedback.

At PyCon US 2026, we discussed the plan at the Members Lunch, an Open Space session, and in conversations throughout the conference. Financial sustainability came up as a clear concern, and we heard the community’s interest in more transparency on the PSF’s financial picture. We are working on that and will share an update as soon as we can.

For this round, we are asking for feedback on the strategic direction: are these the right goals, are the objectives the right ones, and is anything important missing? Implementation details will follow and will be shaped by PSF staff over time.

How to share your feedback:

The feedback window closes on June 25, 2026, End of Day, Anywhere on Earth. After that, the board will integrate feedback ahead of a future board meeting.

Thank you for helping shape this plan. If you use Python, contribute to it, or participate in communities around it, you have a stake in getting it right.

Jannis Leidel, PSF Board Chair, on behalf of the PSF Board of Directors

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Here are some ideas that could contribute to a more stable community. It is simple to strengthen user engagement through a system of moral and measurable rewards that would help stabilize and motivate the community. You could create categories of user types with badges at different levels: training (blogger, school, development, security), usage (Windows, Linux, jobs), and involvement (financial, business).

Build a communication tower within a single online community that includes official social channels, an interactive map, and a dedicated proposals area.

I would also recommend improving Python’s default IDE, enhancing the way Python packages are delivered into development environments, signing and securing packages used by developers in applications, and improving how these packages are compiled — for example, enabling single-file executables.

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It’s hard to find much to argue against in this document, and that in itself makes me wonder if it is concrete enough to have tangible consequences. Nonetheless I have a few questions/comments.

Near the beginning, it says:

Staffing is the binding constraint.

And of course, funding is the binding constraint on staffing. Given this, it would seem that increasing funding is far more important than all other goals, since all other goals depend on staffing which depends on funding. Although this theoretically raises a risk of a “paperclip-maximizing” philosophy (i.e., an unhealthy fixation on getting money), it seems like a realistic prioritization in practice, especially since so far it seems like the PSF is far underfunded.

In that light, the main question mark for me is how these various goals will be implemented, prioritized, and traded off against one another in the face of limited funding. It is all very well to say we want to do this, that, and the other, but that isn’t much help when there isn’t enough money to do even half a thing.

Interviews revealed that some sponsors may want to give the PSF more if given more opportunities.

Without more explanation I find this difficult to understand. What kinds of additional “opportunities” are needed? If someone is giving $10,000, are they somehow not free to give another $10,000 even though they want to? Or are we talking about a situation where a sponsor is giving some form of in-kind contribution which can’t be increased because no more could be used[1]?

It’s hard to tell from what it says there, but it sounds to me like maybe a more specific goal would be something like “focus on getting unrestricted monetary contributions that can be used to further any of the PSF’s goals”.

The PyCon US situation is a big problem. It says here that PyCon is “the backbone of sponsor relationships”, yet it is not profitable. Does that profitability calculation incorporate whatever gains come from sponsors for whom the PyCon relationship is essential? The impression I get from this limited info (plus some stuff that’s been discussed on this forum) is that PSF is putting a lot of eggs in that basket, but the basket is starting to show signs of crumbling. That is worrisome.

Overall the goals sound good. I especially support the goal of transparency (already evidenced by this document and this thread!). I guess one thing I would like to see more of (although it is mentioned briefly) is outreach in the sense of gathering feedback from the Python community at large about what they see as priorities for Python and the PSF. There was some talk about revising the PSF Developer Survey and hopefully that can be a step in this direction.

  1. e.g., a providing transportation for some event cannot give more transportation than is necessary for the number of people attending ↩︎

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